Transformational Pattern System – Some Assembly Required

In the context of Model Driven Architecture (MDA), most model transformation mechanisms aim for rigorously and unambiguously defined, fully automatic transformations. We argue that such techniques, even when fully mature, are not applicable in all cases of software development. These difficult cases would benefit from flexible and semi-automatic open transformations. We present a mechanism, so called transformational pattern system, and show how it can combine human made decisions and intentionally vague and incomplete rules to perform a transformation.